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An overweight girl with long, stringy hair speaks to us candidly about her experiences worshipping Satan: "In the beginning it starts out as 'OK, this is fun, there's no harm,' yet, um, like, week by week, month by month, you can see a difference, you get sucked into the darkness and then you sit there going, 'Whoa,' ya know. It started out as a fun time and it ended up in total dark reality."

Berkowitz attributes all of the 1977 murders to his involvement in Satanism: a bad crowd he fell in with when he was "looking for friends," who hung around and did what originally looked like "innocent little rituals" with Anton LaVey's "Satanic Bible." Berkowitz says that Satan worship eventually caused him to be "a slave and servant of the devil" and that, due to various oaths and "blood pacts," he was unable to break free from his neighborhood congregation of Satanists. "Possession by evil spirits," he claims, according to a New York Times article, is what caused him to listen to the urgings of his neighbor's black Labrador retriever, which told him to randomly find young couples making out in cars and girls with long, brown hair and shoot them in the face.

The girl who got the abortion seems to be the only person in the film in touch with any kind of deep remorse for killing anything. The film seems to make the point that David Berkowitz, because he is a born-again Christian now, is a much better and more enlightened person than all those teens out there still drinking and having gay and/or premarital sex and having abortions, which are practically just the same as shooting people in the face. Jesus Christ died for David Berkowitz's sins! Isn't that fucking great? Isn't that rich? He's forgiven! Everything is OK.

The real question is, What kind of sicko Christian organization would stoop to using the fame of a serial killer to promote teen interest in Christianity?

The foam tube metaphor comes back to haunt us, as Bill Meyers stands over the now long and wide V made of many lengths of tubing, representing a long path of repeated bad decisions. "Amazing, isn't it, how just a few wrong choices can ruin an entire life. Like Berkowitz, regardless of how far you've gone off the path, there is a way to come back. No matter how much wrong you've done, there's a way to have every wrong we've ever done be completely forgiven -- David Berkowitz found that way."

Berkowitz, with his nobody-will-give-you-a-better-deal-on-a-Mazda demeanor, announces that he has been visited by God Almighty and given a new name. "At one time, I was called tha Son of Sam. Today, God has said, 'You are now tha Son of Hope!" Berkowitz punctuates each word by pointing aggressively into the viewer's eye, "That's my new name, tha Son of Hope."

Roll over, Jesus.
salon.com | July 16, 1999

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